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And I thought I was making some progress telling her about the innovation under socialism, definitions of economic systems, and so on. She’s a doomer anarcho-pacifist btw. She has been wasting hours of my life recent by constantly texting and not really listening to me.
I've noticed what (sounds like) a similar wall with more than one person where they are more or less willing to agree with me that the current setup of things is a mess, but the moment I start talking a solution that is more than reforms, the Cold War type of indoctrination kicks in (I'm USian) and I feel suddenly like I'm being putting on the hook to justify people or countries (which are in their minds) monsters. IME, it seems to have something to do with the extent to which a person still thinks the US project is some kind of "flawed, but admirable project", and believes perspectives presented to them by imperialist media on other countries with little questioning. But maybe this is a whole other different take on it too if she calls herself an anarcho-pacifist; although I do wonder because I was once at a point where I called myself a "libertarian-socialist" before I had any exposure to theory and I just sort of thought that made sense because it sounded like the "not controlling and violent" way of doing things. Demystifying and dismantling the fog of Cold War stuff seems to be an important element in getting through as well as serious reading of theory, if only I knew how to get there with people. I think Luna Oi's videos and streams on Vietnam helped me some with concretizing defenses of socialist projects, though my ability to memorize details and share them to others is abysmal, so I would have to convince people to sit down and watch.
I know what you mean. That happened once when I mentioned ML out of the gate. She doesn’t call herself anpac, but she identifies with the words anarchist and communist. Since she hates all authority she explicitly says she only thinks “communism” can happen in small and short periods (coops/communes, nothing more). She is very steeped in the idea humans are inherently selfish and so on. I have given her the argument that we’ve lived far more time in “primitive” communism during our species existence, but she rationalizes it as capitalism forever having harmed human nature, and since you’d need power to build a better society and “power corrupts” then it’s hopeless. I doubt she’d read ‘On Authority’ as she’s offended by the notion I’d try to teach her anything. I thought I was making progress with AES a few times. I gave her the positive example of Gaddafi and how their natural resources were being used to help the people, and she seemed swayed, but she used his assassination as a reason to say fighting capitalism is futile. I thought I made some headway talking about Stalin’s lack of wealth. Of course, she wouldn’t read the CIA quote saying there was collective leadership because she can’t learn anything. On China she at first seemed to think it was “literally 1498,” and once I showed her statistics like the decrease of poverty and government support she seemed to think “China’s forcing their people to have better lives.” I tried to send her videos showing China’s relatively normal, but she refused to watch. Later when I was talking more about their democracy, but admitted they weren’t socialist bc of special economic zones, she seemed to think they were actually democratic, but little more than bourgeois democracies and also that the temporary acceptance of capital means fighting capitalism is futile.
Yeesh, sounds like she is very resistant to accepting an alternative POV. I do wonder with people like that if they basically are only ever going to be swayed by example (e.g. organized working class power happens in their area and they become a part of it). IIRC, there was someone in passing kinda like that in the How Yukong Moved the Mountains documentary, who admitted to having been skeptical or resistant to the changes at first, but saw value in what was being done when the results came to pass.